The Forgotten Sins
by scullyseviltwin
Summary: He hurts and can't help it. Can't help wanting her, can't help needing her, can't help feeling as though he's failing so many people at once, least of all himself.


There's a point where he stops waiting for the end and realizes that this is a 'forever' thing, and he can't get out of it. Funny thing, when one thinks of forever, it's always gilded and shiny and wonderful and fuck it all if that's not the way it ever turns out. He's lying in bed next to his wife, his _wife_ and he's not thinking of her at all.

Elliot thinks about everything else nowadays and it's so predictable. Maybe it's a wonder that he's lasted this long, that they've lasted this long in something most would call a marriage. They have a joint checking account and insurance and kids in college and all of that normal shit that married couples have. It's not their fault, he supposes, just more victims of an unfortunate generation of people.

They don't have love anymore, that's another thing that married couples have. A lot of them, a lack of love. Elliot wrestles his own thumbs and glances at the shadows that float around on the ceiling, as though they were clouds, as though he can divine the future from them. If he could, it wouldn't be two-thirty in the morning and he wouldn't be awake and wouldn't be thinking about his partner again.

God damn, it's just, everything is so negative.

And the next morning he's just predictable. His life has become this pattern where even the danger is sad and he takes risks because he doesn't think he can feel anymore. Her hand on his shoulder though, that sparks something and so he goes out of his way to make that happen. Repetion, day in, day out. Coffee and crime and people he'll never see again. Angst and familiarity and a longing in his chest that threatens to swallow him whole.

There are months and months and years of this.

Elliot would say that it's complicated, but it really isn't. He's in love with a woman he'll never have and all of that, but then, he knew that this was a job hazard. He'd like to think that he fell because she was just _there_ all of the time, because she was the person with whom he spent the majority of the time, but that'd just be an easy lie.

He loves her because she's Olivia and he's himself and sometimes that's just how the cards fall. It's probably the saddest, the most pathetic thing anyone's ever heard, their story. You'd think he didn't have any balls, but that's what a sense of tradition can turn a man into. His skin's a shell and inside there's just barely a human being because he's tired and he's played this charade for years now and she's all that's left to go on.

There's a file on his desk, he flips it open and like that he's ripping into someone else's life, they both are, fighting to make it all better again, with liberty and justice for all. If he'd kept a wins and losses tally-and he so wishes he had-he'd bet that one was far more weighted than the other. She'd bet the opposite, if he ever asked because as cynical as she is, she just can't believe that evil beats good in the scheme of "All Things."

Sometimes he watches her in the summer, flipping through her own files, so desperate for a closed case and he imagines himself peeling the freckles from her shoulders, imagine how they'd taste as she holds them as though she's carrying the weight of the world. The thoughts he's reduced to with murder and rape on the back burner, he hates it, hates it all, can't help it.

The ring on his hand weighs him down when he reaches out to grab her arm, hold her back, hold on.

He lives awhile as though the powder keg is about to meet match at any second; if his rage was any match, it'd have gone up long ago. She looks at him as though she senses the end too, and they take on the world together as a singular entity, as though there was any other way. She craves it as much as he does and they seek the cataclysm endlessly, tirelessly. Cataclysm and catharsis, they'd go hand in hand and maybe if they press on, work harder-

She cries, twice. Each time, he holds her and he knows _how_ to. Olivia's body molded to his and this is how it's supposed to be. Her tears perforating the cloth barrier between her skin and his and it's such a blessed thing, he forgets the cause. Too much, the hands in her hair and the way she chokes in breaths as if maybe he wasn't holding her, she wouldn't be breathing at all.

They're the type of thing that lasts forever, the everything between them. It's a comforting thing, that he knows what a soulmate is, that he knows there's a perfect opposite that compliments him. A shame, that he missed the mark, so entirely. There's a cosmic element to it, and he wonders, from time to time, if things were different and he hadn't been married or part of a family or anyone else if this would have happened at all. Fate is fate, after all, and he's a Christian and so he believes that all of this is part of God's plan.

Lately, he and God have been at odds.

He hurts and can't help it. Can't help wanting her, can't help needing her, can't help feeling as though he's failing so many people at once, least of all himself.

Elliot lays with his wife and tries to believe that Kathy knows all of this, all of these things that he thinks and can't speak. If this is all a charade-and there's a real part of him that nows it is-he'd at least like for her to know the truth, he owes her that. Elliot loved her once and she loved him once and the one thing that they have now is a raw sort of honestly that keeps them both human. "Let's just get through this," she sighs in resignation from time to time; he has to remind himself that she's referring to life.

Let's get through life, says Kathy and it's an acknowledgment that they're in it until the end. A be all and end all and fuck it all.

He lies awake at night, watches the shadows pass over his ceiling and waits for another day to force its way over the horizon.

He wonders how he still does it; he wonders why.

This _never_ stops.


End file.
